21 Dec
2021
21 Dec
'21
4:42 p.m.
On Tue, Dec 21, 2021 at 11:22 AM Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
I get the historical interest, but in today's world, is there any
advantage to ksh over bash? I get that lots of
scripts are run
with /bin/sh and it is nice when that is fast, but aren't the cpus
fast enough these days that it sort of doesn't matter?
Ubuntu chose it as the default shell for sysvinit startup scripts in 2006
(from which it spread to BSD) precisely because it was much faster than
bash. It's also smaller: bash is a memory hog.
When I wrote a whole (batch) application in about 120 Perl and shell
scripts in 1999-2001, I often needed multiple shell scripts running
simultaneously, sometimes for concurrency and sometimes just from scripts
calling other scripts. So I made sure everything ran under Solaris sh,
which was a modified Bourne shell at that time and so was much lighter than
bash, which I used for development. Nowadays I'd use dash in the same
circumstances.